Scheduling queries to improve the freshness of a website

• Main Authors: LIU, Haifeng, NG, Wee-Keong, LIM, Ee Peng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2005
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/78; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1077/viewcontent/10.1023_2FB_WWWJ.0000047378.69751.72.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The World Wide Web is a new advertising medium that corporations use to increase their exposure to consumers. Very large websites whose content is derived from a source database need to maintain a freshness that reflects changes that are made to the base data. This issue is particularly significant for websites that present fast-changing information such as stock-exchange information and product information. In this article, we formally define and study the freshness of a website that is refreshed by a scheduled set of queries that fetch fresh data from the databases. We propose several online-scheduling algorithms and compare the performance of the algorithms on the freshness metric. We show that maximizing the freshness of a website is a NP-hard problem and that the scheduling algorithm MiEF performs better than the other proposed algorithms. Our conclusion is verified by empirical results.